When Elrod rejoined them, the group started to make their way back toward the upper levels. They took a different path this time, heading for another way up that would take Twilight closer to where she wanted to go. Elrod did not question her choice of path, although as the city around them began to become darker and even more quiet he began to wonder just how safe that decision was.

None of them spoke. Twilight and Forth did not mention their conversation, and Elrod did not relay any of what Hoig had told him. Neither party saw a need to. In Twilight’s case it was because she did not care if Elrod knew her reasoning, and in Elrod’s case it was because Hoig’s advice was redundant. He had never trusted Twilight, at least not completely- -and not yet.

The city around them grew more ominous. There were less lights, and less people, save for those that occasionally glanced through darkened windows or small groups of people in old, stained clothing sitting off on side alleys. In time, even those disappeared and all that remained were the dark buildings and the mist.

“I don’t like this,” said Elrod at last as they stepped into the glow of one lonely streetlight that had not yet been shattered. “It’s too dark here.”

“Not for us,” said Forth. “We can both see well.”

“But I’m not a pony. I don’t have artificial eyes.”

“Trust me,” said Twilight. She stopped walking. “You’d rather not.”

Almost as soon as she said it, a figure emerged from the darkness and stepped into the weak light of the streetlight. The cold fog was only about the height of a human waist, so she was at first obscured. As she got nearer, though, her dress became apparent: she wore sheer fishnet stockings and a small red jacket that was open in the front. One of her breasts was uncovered; the other had been removed to make way for the base of a black-colored cybernetic arm. Her face was covered in makeup, but it was apparent that she had two mismatched cybernetic eyes. One was dim but reflected green in the light, while the other was pale blue. They were not even the same brand.

“Hey,” she said. Her voice was unpleasantly raspy, a result of lungs no doubt riddled with static cancer.

“We are not interested,” said Forth, stepping forward. “We are leaving now.”

The woman smiled. It was the coldest smile Elrod had ever seen. “No you’re not.” She raised her cybernetic arm, and as her hand left the mist Elrod saw a large pistol in her hand. It was pointed at his chest.

In that moment Elrod froze. He could almost see the bullet down the barrel, or thought he could. This was the first time he had ever had a gun pointed at him that was not immediately fired. Somehow, the suspense made it so much worse. If he had possessed the capacity to urinate, he would have wet himself.

“Sorry,” the girl said. Then she moved to pull the trigger- -but stopped. Her eyes grew wide as she looked at her hand, and she grunted as she struggled to make her finger move. “What- -what the fuck?!”

Suddenly, her arm started to move. She cried out and grabbed it with her organic arm, trying to force it back. The cybernetic limb was far stronger, though, and as much as she struggled and writhed and tried to push it away there was no way to stop it- -or to escape it. Slowly and without hesitation, she pointed the pistol at her own temple. By this time a look of pure panic had crossed her face, and she stopped struggling.

Twilight lit a cigarette. “See, that’s the problem with cheap cybernetics,” she said. “They don’t bother trying to do any brainwork. They just graft the controls onto peripheral nerves. You’re not the one telling it what to do, your nerves are just giving suggestions to the computer.”

“What- -what- -you are doing this? How?!”

“Easy. That’s the second problem with cheap shit. No security. I don’t give computers suggestions. I give them orders.”

“Twilight,” said Elrod, “you’re doing this?”

“Sure am,” she said, calmly. “And I don’t think I need to explain to you that I could make you pull the trigger on that gun, and you couldn’t do a thing to stop me. You’d have committed suicide. A sad story, I think. What is that, a .223 hollowpoint?” She sighed. “A shame. Such a pretty face, it seems sad to it’ll get blown off. Oh well.”

“Wait! WAIT!” cried the girl. “Please! DON’T!”

“Why shouldn’t I? I’m out for a walk, not trying to do anything out of the ordinary…and here you come, pointing a pistol at my client. That just isn’t right.”

“Uncouth, even,” said Forth.

Twilight paused, and without smiling turned her robotic eyes up at the girl. “So I have to do what I have to do. Unless…”

“Unless what? WHAT? I can do things- -”

“‘Things’ don’t concern me. I want cash.”

The girl looked even more afraid, and disgusted at the same time. “Cash?”

“Five thousand vod, and you walk away from here as if this never happened.”

“Five- -five thousand?! I don’t have that much! If I had that much vod I wouldn’t be doing this!”

Twilight shrugged. “Then I’m pulling the trigger.”

“NO!” she cried.

“Don’t tell me what to do, human.” Twilight paused again. Elrod felt sick.

“It wasn’t even my idea! It wasn’t ME!”

“Then who was it? Tell me, and I’ll take the information as payment.”

“She said- -she said she would pay me. So much money. Enough to get myself out of here, to stop doing this- -this- -you know!”

“Or enough to pay for your weight in amphetamines.”

The girl looked hurt, but there was a sadness in her robotic eyes that betrayed the fact that Twilight was at least partially right. “I didn’t want to, I don’t like hurting people, but I had to! I can’t turn down something like that! All I had to do was pop this guy in the face.” She pointed with her free arm at Elrod. “Right here, in front of you. That was it! That’s all I wanted to do!” She began crying. Her makeup was already running, but now she looked like a mess. “Please, please let me go, I have children!”

“Who offered to pay you?” asked Twilight.

“A pony, it was- -”

There was a distant clinking sound, and the girl suddenly lurched. Elrod felt something metal shatter near his foot, and looked up to see a single hole in the girl’s forehead.

“Twilight!” cried Forth.

“That wasn’t me,” said Twilight, sidestepping as the girl fell and looking up to the buildings surrounding them. Her eyes flitted from side to side before they finally fell on a tall, thin figure in the distance. “There!” she said as she started galloping forward. “Forth, cut him off, I’ll take point!”

Forth nodded and vanished with surprising speed. Elrod was left alone. There was not much he could do to help anyway, though. Instead, he turned his attention toward the dead girl on the street. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, he knelt down and turned her over. Then he proceeded to start removing her eyes.

Twilight raced forward after the thin figure. It retreated out of sight on the roof of the building where it was standing, but Twilight spread her wings and quickly leapt up after it. The street they had been walking on was something like a gorge, and this higher area was cut with numerous footpaths and second-level buildings. The light was low, But Twilight did not care. She was accustomed to the dark.

She ran after it, calculating the most likely routes that her target would take. He was fast, but so was Twilight. Losing her would not be easy. Even if it did, catching the target was not critical. Twilight just needed to track it and eventually force it toward Forth

For a moment Twilight thought she had lost it, but then she ducked around a corner and saw it. Twilight’s internal records of Level C indicated that it had gone into a dead-end alleyway. She followed it, knowing fully well that she might be walking into a trap. There was no other option, though: there was no time to formulate a better plan.

Twilight’s coat swished through the silent air as she pushed through the entrance of the alley. Most of the second story that she was on was higher than the mists below, but several vents in this alley were producing copious amounts of hot steam. This disrupted Twilight’s infrared perception, although not completely. She saw the figure standing on the far side of the path, looking up at a high wall.

“Stop!” called Twilight, her voice echoing off the walls of the alley.

The figured turned, but only partially. Twilight could vaguely see its outline. It was incredibly thin and tall, to the point where she was not sure how something like that was even capable of standing, let alone moving so fast.

Suddenly a jet of orange light shot from its back and in leapt hallway up one of the buildings.

“What the fuck?” said Twilight to herself.

The figure then began crawling up the building less like a humanoid and more like an insect. Its hands separated from the wall leaving only its feet to scramble up the vertical surface, and in the instant that it did Twilight saw a collapsible rifle unfold.

There was no sound when it fired, but Twilight did not need the crack of a gun to warn her that bullets were coming. She rolled on her side, and the self-guiding bullets traced her path. One of them penetrated her shoulder before she was able to duck behind a dumpster. The others could not adjust course in time and disintegrated on the metal, flying through it and imbedding in the concrete wall.

“Fuck me,” groaned Twilight, wincing in pain. The bullets were not OKD rounds, but they were armor-piercing. With her body, a shoulder-hit was mostly trivial. If it had hit part of her multicore, though, she would have been done for.

Strangely, though, whoever was fleeing from her seemed more concerned with egress than with killing Twilight. No more bullets came. Twilight ducked through a window into the building and once again started running, this time through narrow moldering halls with rotted floors and stacks of clutter and junk on either side.

“Out of my way!” cried Twilight, pushing past the residents of the building who stared at her with either confusion or drug-induced ambivalence. Those that did not move, Twilight shoved. Humans were tall, but not as heavy as ponies and far less stable. They barely slowed her down.

Twilight burst through the far side of the building and descended glided several stories to the ground below. Her target appeared to have vanished, but not Twilight knew the landscape. There were only a few places he could have gone. She focused her mind and reached out to every unprotected system she could find. Most of them were not what she needed and at least half were flooded with malware, but she disarmed them almost instantly and filtered away the chaff and trash until she had access to every eye, sensor, or piece of unsecured security equipment in a ten block radius.

The mental strain of coordinating that much raw information was vast, but not exceedingly so. Twilight did not even need to hold it long. She saw a flash of pale green, and a dark shadow. She knew where her target was.

Once again she moved quickly, tracing her path through the city. She was coordinating Forth’s movements remotely, telling her exactly what region to move. The number of potential paths was decreasing exponentially as the pair of them drew closer with the target in the center.

Then, suddenly, Twilight broke free of the buildings and web of pathways. She found herself standing at the edge of a transport road. Fog covered the hot surface, but there were more lights here. Through the mist and silence, Twilight could see the figure she had been chasing. He was standing in the center of the road.

“You!” cried Twilight. “Stop right there.” She stepped slowly to the edge of the road. She was not out of breath; ponies did not tire. “Don’t try to shoot me again,” she said. “You caught me by surprise last time, but now I know the control frequency of your bullets. Fire one at me and I’ll send it through your head.”

The figure stopped in the road and slowly turned toward Twilight. Twilight recoiled slightly when she saw its face. It was not human, or even a “he”. Twilight found herself staring into the face of a unicorn, and from the look in the pale amber eyes that stared back at her, she knew that somehow this thing was a pony.

The creature did not speak. It only smiled and took a long, silent step toward Twilight. Twilight reached out with her mind, attempting to find something to grasp onto. There was nothing. This creature was clearly a machine of some kind, but every aspect of its programming was sealed off. There were no avenues of entry; it was as though it did not even exist.

It took another step forward, and Twilight saw it reaching for the compressed rifle mounted on its back. The rifle bore no brand marker, and Twilight did not recognize it. Twilight did not take a step back, though, nor did she flinch.

“What the hell are you?” she asked.

The creature paused for a moment, as if legitimately considering the question. Then the smile fell from her face, and she spoke with the voice of a pony. “Incomplete.”

At that moment a transport truck came barreling around the corner of the transport road. It was traveling far faster than conditions would have allowed, and it did not slow for the figure in front of it, either because she was obscured in the mist or because they simply did not care.

It was a lethal mistake. With her rifle in one hand, the creature raised the other. The heavy truck slammed into her palm. Her right foot dug into the ground as she braced against it, but she did not move more than an inch. The truck lurched and deformed. There was a red splatter on the inside of the windshield as the driver collided with the steering column and shattered.

The half-pony creature then slung its rifle around its neck and, as Twilight watched, took the truck in both hands. Despite having forearms that were barely an inch wide and upper arms that seemed to be mostly armor, she lifted the truck with ease and threw it through the air toward Twilight.

Twilight stared up at the truck as it passed through the air toward her, and time seemed to slow down. She sighed. It was said that when humans were about to die, their whole lives flashed before their eyes. Twilight was not sure if that was true, and she supposed she would never know. For ponies, though, there was a different phenomenon. As the truck approached through the air, it seemed to slow as Twilight’s processing speed accelerated. In her overclocked state, time seemed to pass at a glacial pace.

Almost instantly, Twilight started moving toward her left. Her synthetic muscles strained under her soft violet skin as they pulled her away at maximum speed. She was moving at a pace that few ponies could hope to achieve, but her mind was moving far faster. To Twilight, it seemed as though the atmosphere had somehow become thick and viscous; that was the only way to describe how the weight and inertia of every object seemed to have grown to nearly unmanageable proportions.

The mental acceleration had side effects. Mainly, it gave Twilight time to think. She could look up and calculate the exact trajectory of the truck overhead, and her current speed; from the combination, it was clear that with her shoulder injury escape was not guaranteed. At the same time, memories that she had not recalled in decades surfaced to her. Twilight could suddenly remember every book she had ever read to the point where she could re-read them in her mind if she chose to. She did, and covered several. Yet the whole time, she could not managed to pull her mind away from one particular memory. She could not help but recall Roxanne.

Slowly, Twilight caused herself to revolve in the air. She looked at the creature- -the strange bipedal thing with a pony’s face and mane- -and extended her left hoof. A small black line could be seen at the edge of it, one that ran up her entire foreleg. It was identical to the numerous lines that covered Forth’s entire body.

Twilight’s sleeve was torn apart as the line split. The armored surface of her hoof parted, revealing the machinery beneath. That machinery in turn reconfigured itself revealing the barrel of a weapon. An internal solenoid fired it, and Twilight watched as the Beowulf round emerged from her barrel. Compared to everything else, it seemed to be moving quickly, but it was still traveling slow enough for Twilight to be able to watch it. She saw the muzzle flash, and then the puff of fire around the bullet as the uranium that it was made of reacted with the atmosphere. Even the rotation of the bullet was visible.

The cylinder in Twilight’s upper forearm quickly cycled to the next chamber, and she fired again. She kept firing until she only had two rounds left. By then, her shoulder was inches from the ground and she was preparing to land painfully.

The bullets marched forward, and they flew true. The first three hit their target, producing small plumes of sparks as the uranium disintegrated against the creature’s teal armor without leaving the slightest scratch or dent. The forth she dodged. The fifth, though, caused Twilight’s eyes to widen. She watched as the creature easily moved its hand in the path of the bullet, catching it out of the air and crushing it in an instant.

Then time seemed to accelerate. Twilight landed hard on the pavement and skidded out of the way of the truck just as it slammed into the ground where she had been only moments before. It rolled backward and into the wall of the nearest building, leaving a massive whole as it pushed most of the way through the concrete façade.

The creature looked at Twilight and it smiled. It raised its hand and dropped what had once been a fifty caliber solid uranium bullet. The now flattened piece of deformed metal fell to the floor with a dull tinkling sound. Without a word, it turned around- -and found itself face-to-face with Forth, who was standing on the far end of the road.

“Hello,” said Forth, cheerfully. “I have been tasked to eliminate your heresy from the public consciousness. Not in those words. But you know what will happen next.”

The creature did. She nodded solemnly and looked over her shoulder at Twilight. Then she smiled. Twilight immediately sensed a massive surge of bandwidth usage around her, but before she could even begin to trace it the creature’s body erupted with orange light from within.

There was no explosion. It just cracked and disappeared, collapsing to ash like a burnt piece of paper. In a fraction of a second nothing was left of the creature or her rifle save for smoldering dust and a foul smell.

Twilight started standing up. “Oh,” said Forth, looking to her boss. “I suppose I won?”

It took several more minutes of waiting before Elrod appeared. He was out of breath and it was apparent that he had been running. At one side he held a black cybernetic arm, ribbons of flesh still dangling from the edge where it had once been connected to a living body.

“What took so long?” said Twilight.

“I didn’t have my tools,” he said. “I had to make to. Also, I got lost.” He looked at the crashed truck. The wall behind it was smoking slightly, but no one had come to investigate. No one really cared. “Oh,” he said. “That type normally has a driver. I wonder if he has anything good.”

“If you want to spend the next month trying to get him out of there,” said Twilight. “Besides, he’s probably as flat as a pancake anyway.” Twilight looked at the arm. “You scrappers are a bit morbid, aren’t you?”

“We can’t all be detectives.”

“Did you get her wallet?”

“Yeah, sure.” Elrod removed the squares U-shaped device with its small golden ampule. A string had been tied around one end with pictures of the woman’s children dangling from it. “I always take- -HEY!”

Twilight had knocked the wallet from his hand and immediately drained all of the vod into her own account. When the old wallet was empty and no longer had any sign of luminescent glow, she tossed it away.

“Why did you do that?” asked Elrod.

“I ruined my favorite coat for you. Plus, I got shot. Do you have any idea how expensive repairs on this type of body are? If I have to order any replacement parts, I am literally going to sell you into slavery for the funds.”

“She will do it too,” added Forth, who was preening one of her wings on top of the damaged truck.

“I don’t doubt that, and it scares me,” said Elrod. He turned back to Twilight. “Did you catch your man?”

“It wasn’t a man.”

“Woman?”

“Not a woman either. It looked like how you described the things that tried to kill you.”

Elrod’s eyes widened and he looked around. “Did it get away? Is it still here?”

“No, she self-destructed. Waste of a beautiful system in my opinion, but pragmatic.”

“Her technology was not consistent with anything I am aware of,” said Forth.

“Nor me,” replied Twilight. “And I’m familiar with almost everything. So that’s just not good.”

“Why not?”

“Because it means that we’ve probably stepped in shit a few fathoms over our heads. Or a few miles. I don’t know.” Twilight stood up and lit a cigarette. “Holy shit…this seals it, though, I guess.”

“Seals what? What are you talking about?”

“The technomancer. It’s our only lead. I was trying to think of another way, but we don’t have the time. That thing could have taken any of us out with a single hit. I don’t know why it didn’t, but I don’t think they’ll make the same mistake twice. This one tried to run. If they send more? We’re done. All of us.”

Elrod gulped. “That’s not good.”

“You have a knack for understatement.” Twilight started down the street. “Come on. I’m going to need your help on this one.”